Something will come, he thought. I need only wait. But he waited, and nothing came, except deeper strangeness. He felt a throbbing in his forehead, a humming in his ears. Then he experienced a powerful sense of himself here in the Labyrinth as occupying a place at the precise center of the world, the core of the whole gigantic globe. But some irresistible force was pulling him from that place. Between one moment and the next his soul went surging from him as though it were a great mantle of light, streaming upward through the many layers of the Labyrinth to the surface and then reaching forth to encompass all the immensity of Majipoor, even to the distant coasts of Zimroel and sun-blackened Suvrael, and the unknown expanse of the Great Sea on the far side of the planet. He wrapped the world like a glowing veil. In that dizzying moment he felt that he and the planet were one, that he embodied in himself the twenty billion people of Majipoor, humans and Skandars and Hjorts and Metamorphs and all the rest, moving within him like the corpuscles of his blood. He was everywhere at once: he was all the sorrow in the world, and all the joy, and all the yearning, and all the need. He was everything. He was a boiling universe of contradictions and conflicts. He felt the heat of the desert and the warm rain of the tropics and the chill of the high peaks.

He laughed and wept and died and made love and ate and drank and danced and fought and rode wildly through unknown hills and toiled in the fields and cut a path through thick vine-webbed jungles. In the oceans of his soul vast sea dragons breached the surface and let forth monstrous bleating roars and dived again, to the uttermost depths. Faces without eyes hovered before him, grinning, leering. Bony attenuated hands fluttered in the air. Choirs sang discordant hymns. All at once, at once, at once, a terrible lunatic simultaneity.

He stood in silence, bewildered, lost, as the room reeled wildly about him. "Propose the toast, lordship,"

Deliamber seemed to be saying over and over. "First to the Pontifex, and then to his aides, and then—"

Control yourself, Valentine thought. You are Coronal of Majipoor.

With a desperate effort he pulled himself free of that grotesque hallucination.

"The toast to the Pontifex, lordship—"

"Yes. Yes, I know."

Phantom images still haunted him. Ghostly fleshless fingers plucked at him. He fought free. Control.

Control. Control.

He felt utterly lost.

"The toast, lordship!"

The toast? The toast? What was that? A ceremony. An obligation upon him. You are Coronal of Majipoor. Yes. He must speak. He must say words to these people.

"Friends—" he began. And then came the dizzying plunge into chaos.

8

"The Coronal wants to see you," Shanamir said.

Hissune looked up, startled. For the past hour and a half he had been waiting tensely in a dismal many-columned antechamber with a grotesque bulbous ceiling, wondering what was happening behind the closed doors of Lord Valentine's suite and whether he was supposed to remain here indefinitely. It was well past midnight, and some ten hours from now the Coronal and his staff were to depart from the Labyrinth on the next leg of the grand processional, unless tonight's strange events had altered that plan. Hissune still had to make his way all the way up to the outermost ring, gather his possessions and say goodbye to his mother and sisters, and get back here in time to join the outbound party—and fit some sleep into the picture, too. All was in confusion.